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Re:How to Crawl the Web with Scrapy by amozoss on Monday September 13, 2021 @04:09PM (#28516173)
My brother-in-law had just finished his pilot training and was trying to apply for a job as teacher to continue his training.

However, the jobs were first come, first serve so he was waking up at 4 am and constantly refreshing for hours trying to be the first one.

When I heard about it, I quickly whipped up a `curl | grep && send_notif` (used pushback.io for notifs) and it helped him not have to worry so much.

When a new job posting finally came along he was the first in line and got the job :)

Re:How to Crawl the Web with Scrapy by getcrunk on Monday September 13, 2021 @08:39PM (#28518766)
Was rate limiting not a concern? How often did you run it? I'm sure you had to keep some state too?
Re:How to Crawl the Web with Scrapy by amozoss on Monday September 13, 2021 @10:57PM (#28519674)
Their website was pretty trivial, but I beefed up the script to check for failure status code and also notify me if it wasn't 200.

I ran it every minute.

I had to include a unique uuid to cache bust, but other than that there wasn't any state.

I wrote about it here https://plainice.com/webscrape-notifications